Birthday Weekend A Success; Nation Cheers

Josh and me in the minibus on the way to the Thai border.


Uhhhhhh.... right. This is what Josh is around for. READ THE SIGN, MONKEY! No, really, he's totally good at reading signs and I am proud.


Raul (we named our car Raul. Get on board.) has many cousins in Thailand! His name is Pracornchit. No seriously.


Oh god THE FOOD. Coconut Curried Fish and Braised Pork with Green Chili, over jasmine rice. OH GOD THE FOOD.


Even better with a bottle of $2 ice cold Singha beer. OH MY GOD THE FOOD.


From left to right: red beef curry with coconut milk, red braised pork in ginger-wine broth, sour tamarind curry, chicken curry with sweet potato. Did I mention: OH GOD THE FOOD.


Our Thai friends, excited that we could eat "village style". I think it was called village style because there was a pig laying in some mud about fifteen feet to the left and a chicken was sitting under the table at one point. As if farm animals are going to keep me from eating curry.


Me, swimming in a waterfall, in the jungle, the day I turned 32. Swimming in the waterfalls in the jungle was seriously one of the best, most refreshing things I have ever done and I never want to forget about it. Although, two minutes before this, the Thai kids in the picture were laughing at me histerically because I fell into the water, cause I am totally awesomely coordinated. Hope the government doesn't mind my passport being soaked.



This picture is blurry cause it was night and everything was moving and Josh had drank like four beers at this point, but look very carefully at what I am petting. AN ELEPHANT. That's right. I fed it sugarcane and it put its weird, wet trunk on my head and I felt very special.


After many more beers, Josh decided he needed the "Fat Girl Special" from 7-11, which is instant noodles with a spicy hotdog inside. No really, it's called that.


So in summary, Thailand is awesome. That is all.

Langkawi

Just north of Penang Island is another island chain, called Langkawi, which means eagles butt or something in Malay. We went there for two reasons: need more beach time, and it's a duty free port. Which means that a can of beer is 50 cents. Also, this happened on Langkawi: met cute Dutch boys who turned out to be 18, met Finnish girls who were drinking buckets of vodka (no really, buckets- the bar was serving booze in buckets), and went midnight swimming under the southern cross. A very good weekend, all in all.

Banda Aceh: Nature's Least Favorite

I could never understand why over a quarter million people died in the Boxing Day Tsunami in Sumatra. I was on a small island off the west coast of Thailand when it happened, and the destruction was pretty amazing, but the death toll never reached the proportions that it did in Indonesia. And now I know why.

Banda Aceh sits in the middle of a wide, flat plane that is surrounded by an arc of dormant volcanos, effectively forming a half-ring along the coast, in the center of which sits Banda Aceh. The arc of mountains is aligned so that the epicenter of the earthquake that caused the tsunami happened to be directly in front of the ring. The power of the waves that flattened the city must have been phenomenal, while the enclosing mountains ensured that the water level continued to rise as subsequent waves crashed to shore.

Banda is an interesting town today, if only for playing "spot the aid organization logos", which are everywhere, labeling everything. It is pretty much all cleaned up, but there is still a lot of construction to be done. The surprising thing was how empty it felt. Indonesia is a fairly crowded country, but Banda felt positively deserted by local standards. I couldn't figure out if that was because Banda Aceh sits at the very tip of the most western part of Indonesia, or if 250,000 people were missing from daily life.

Palau Wey

We are in Palau Wey right now (NOTE: well, when I wrote this we were), a long way from the rest of the world. Or so it seems, anyway. Blue water from the Indian Ocean curls around my feet as I stand looking out to sea, the next land mass either India to the north or Africa to the west. The Indian Ocean hisses gently at night; tropical showers sometimes start falling, dripping softly off the thatched roof of our hut.

The food? Not so much. Backpacker melange, I call it. Banana pancakes, strange “spaghetti”, odd imitations of Thai food. But I don't care. There's nothing here but the ocean to swim in and the easy camaraderie of displaced people. I've already swam three times today, out past the mouth of the bay, into the deeper, indigo water, watching my toes sparkle below the crystal surface of the gentle water, washing away the grime of the last ten days.

Danau Toba

Here are some pictures of a volcanic lake we went to in North-central Sumatra. It was formed by the largest volcanic explosion that ever happened.

The second largest volcanic explosion that ever happened in Sumatra happened the evening that we arrived, when the effects of Medan's local water caught up with me. There were thousands of casualties; may we never speak of it again.

Melacca, Malaysia

Melacca was kind of ridden hard and put away wet by the colonial powers: founded by the Portuguese, it later became part of Dutch East India before finally bedding down with the British. All that confusion has left a mix of Malays, Straits Chinese, and Tamils, and decades later, a quiet port town filled with the smell of frying chiles and noodles.

Hindus Make the Best Alarm Clocks

Malaysia, and South East Asia, in general, is not a land of sleeping in. When the temperature can reach 95 F/35 C or more by noon, it makes sense that you would get the heavy lifting done before lunch. I, however, am not normally one of those people who rises early. I'm not one of those people who can sleep till 2pm, either, but rousing me from bed before nine am is normally a re-creation of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

Not so in Malaysia, thanks to organized religion.

The Muslims tried their best. They start their call to prayer around 5:45 am this time of year. Yesterday's morning guy was considerably better than today's, the call to prayer starting slow and sweet, but he got some vibrato into it towards the end. Today's guy was either very ill, or maybe had lost his vocal cords in a freak washing machine accident. It sounded like he did the chanting thorough one of those electronic voice boxes. But for either of them, it was simply too short. What, three minutes of amplified warbling is going to wake me up pre-six am? Come on Mohammed.

Yesterday being Sunday, the Catholics tried their best, chiming in with some serious bell work at 6 am, probably just to remind their flock that if they didn't get out of the house while the Muslims were chanting then they were going to be late. But it was pretty weak.

But the Hindus: well now, that was something spectacular. Yesterday they started with some chanting around six thirty, and then about five minutes later a bell joined in. It doesn't sound like much yet, but this 'chanting' could be described as 'yelling', and the 'bell' would be better called a 'gong'. After five more minutes of that, we started in with the drumming. This was not one guy with a bongo- it sounded like the entire drum corps of a NCAA Championship Football Team- back beat, syncopation, a cymbal. This is actually when I woke up the first day. And I blamed it on the Catholics, assuming that because it was a Sunday, they had decided to assemble an actual marching band as a piece de resistance to show the other denominations in town what was the what.

At about the twenty minute mark, this little wake up call has the force of a jet engine and the excitement of a snake charmer, and this is when the horn comes in. The horn doesn't really play a tune, it justs sort of chimes in to underscore that sleeping is over. Hindu scholars might argue that the horn represents Vishnu, or maybe Amber, the destroyer, but for all intents and purposes, Horn says Get On With Your Day.

And that's how I woke up yesterday, and this morning. And because I got up so early, I got to eat this, Masala Thosai (also spelled Masala Dosa in some places). It's like a crispy crepe filled with curried potatoes and served with three separate and delicious sauces. So, in the new world order, the Hindus of South India are invited to be in charge of waking and breakfasting.

Yet another picture of me looking rather odd in a public eating place. Note to self: quitting looking weird on film. PS, to All the Stick People (prior travelling partners extrodinaire), it breaks my heart to be eating this without you. Get your shoes on and meet me here.

One of us! One of us!

Know what is not fun? Being labled as diseased. I can see why lepers hate that so much, what with the jeering and the name calling and all. It's a nasty business.

J and I just crossed the Straits of Johor, between Singapore and Malaysia, over the new Tuas Causeway on a bus. You leave downtown Singapore and then traverse through this strange part of city in the West, full of shops that sell tranmissions for oil dereks, gigantic flywheels, transformers, and other industrial errata that doesn't really fit in with the trim-ladies-walking-around-shopping-for-Hermes-bags part of the city we had been staying in. Ending a sentance with a preposition? Love to. For those of us who grace the Potomac with our presence, it's Singapore's PG County: used cars and grumpy men until the sun sets. I digress.

We got stamped out of Singapore with adrimable efficiency and then drove acorss the Straits, duly presenting perfectly filled out paperwork to a Malaysian official. Now, I've travelled a fair bit, and, as much as I do not like carrying a US passport (too much explaining about how you are not a huge asshole intent on killing your hosts' top officials and then taking their natural resources), the great advantage is that normally just waving it around in the air gets you thorough immigration. Holding that thin blue folio usually allows you to skip the visas, skip proving you have enough money to not die in a ditch in this new country, skip providing finger prints and police reports and dental records or whatever else is asked of people who have less privledged passports. Even paperwork has a pecking order.

But this time, all the immigration officials could see were invisible Swine Flu viruses crawling around on the pages. Because clearly Americans use their passports to clean their noses when ill. Love that paper cut feeling from the stiff card stock. We were shunted off into a separate line, everyone eyeing us, just waiting for one of us to drop dead or explode, spreading the disease all around Malaysia. This must be what the Chinese feel like, as it seems like everywhere they go people are looking at them suspiciously, as if thinking “I know you sleep with a chicken under your pillow- what fresh death are you bringing today?”. Actually, we were the only non-Chinese in the health inspection line.

But luckily, due to the diligance of the Malaysian Immigration service, we were deemed “NOT WALKING DEATH” by having a fourteen year old take our temperature with a peice of tape and a coat hanger. Maybe incubation period doesn't translate well, but still, it's nice that someone is paying attention. I'm glad to know that my temperature is a healthy 38.6 C.